“I started home brewing about nine years ago, and it just kind of progressed from there,” Adams told me when we sat down at a table inside Prohibition on Monday.

In those early days, he was brewing in his large detached garage: “We started bringing friends and family over on Friday nights to sample the product and see how we were doing. It got to the point where our friends would say, ‘Hey, can I bring a friend along?’ So we were getting a lot of feedback about what they did and didn’t like about the beer.”

Adams still works as an electrical contractor — his career of 27 years — but as the co-owner (with his wife) of this popular brewery, he plays a convincing proprietor.

Prohibition opened in November 2011, and business has steadily built.

“On Friday night, Saturday night, you can’t find a table,” Adams said. “We have a very mellow, easygoing crowd of people. So many people tell me, ‘I come in here and it’s like ‘Cheers.’”

That may be one reason why Prohibition is so busy. I had driven past the brewery dozens of times before I realized it was there, set back from the road in a modest building that used to house a nightclub. You have to want to find it.

Inside, the Prohibition theme holds throughout the restaurant, from the mug shots of famous early-1900s criminals to the rack of mock Tommy guns, built by Adams’ woodworking father.

The name and the theme, it turns out, were the product of Kathy Adams’ imagination.

“If you’ve ever tried to name something, it’s not an easy task. My wife and I were going over names, and something that sounded good on Monday wouldn’t sound so good on Wednesday,” he recalled. “But my wife came up with it, and she said, ‘Hey, what do you think of Prohibition?’ And the name kind of stuck.”

Timing has played a major role in Prohibition’s success: Adams was polishing his recipes just as craft brewing began to take off in North County.

Meanwhile, the economic downturn, he said, “sort of motivated us to make that step and open a brewery — when the recession hit, we could see the handwriting on the wall. The type of work we were doing, the size of company that we were, it was going to take a hit. So we took the money we had saved and decided to open a brewpub.

“I’ll tell you,” he added, scanning the dim dining room, “it’s a lot more work than I had anticipated.”

He points to the menu, with its full complement of food, as the single factor that ratcheted up the workload. The building at 2004 East Vista Way was previously a restaurant, and the city of Vista wanted to keep it that way, he recalled.